Wai Chee

Dimock
and
Priscilla
Wald
Preface
Literature and Science: Cultural Forms,
Conceptual Exchanges
In his Rede Lecture of 1959, the English scientist
and novelist C. P. Snow coined the phrase two cultures to describe
a disjunction between the sciences and the humanities that, he be-
lieved, both signaled and produced grave social problems. Four years
later he explained that his primary objective in the lecture was to
sharpen the concern of rich and privileged societies for those less
lucky. But what amazed, angered, or amused his ever broadening
audience, and subsequently became the chief legacy of the piece, was
his claim that the intellectual life of the whole western society is
increasingly being split into two polar groups. Humanists and scien-
tists, he argued, have nothing in common: from their assembled data
to their research methods, from the way they think to the way they
talk, a gulf of mutual incomprehension divides them. They inhabit,
in an anthropological sense, two cultures.
1
The accuracy of Snows comments is not our concern in this special
issue. We are interested more in what Jay Clayton, in his essay in this
volume, calls a convergence. On the one hand, scientic specializa-
tions have moved at such a pace that the untrained are virtually illiter-
ate. On the other hand, the practical impact of this specialized knowl-
edgefrom reproductive technologies to electronic archives, from
bioterrorism to gene therapymakes science illiteracy no longer an
option. Scholars in the humanities simply have to come to terms with
these forces of change. Unpersuaded by the language of crisis with
which some cultural observers have responded to the current situa-
tion, we see an opportunity for creative and productive responses
to the emergence of new forms of knowledge, of cross-disciplinary
American Literature, Volume 74, Number 4, December 2002. Copyright 2002 by Duke
University Press.
706 American Literature
conversations and collaborations, all born of the necessity to address
the growing entanglement of culture, technology, and science. As our
cover art suggests, science can quite literally generate new art forms
that at once register and promote new conceptual exchanges across
and within traditional disciplines.
We do not argue in this special issue that there is a revolution in the
making. Sociologist of science Steven Shapin reminds us that the word
revolution is not neutral, that to speak of a revolution is to subscribe to
the absoluteness of a radical and irreversible reordering developed
together with linear, unidirectional conceptions of time.
2
This uni-
directionality can be contested. Rather than putting the sciences and
the humanities in linear narratives, we have tried to keep in mind that
they are both language systems and that the problem of translating
from one language to another merits renewed and ongoing attention.
We depart from Shapin in focusing less on the social genealogies of
science than on the current intersections among the disciplines, inter-
sections productive of large-scale changes across the entire institu-
tional landscape.
3
This volume grows out of our commitment to that
project.
The questions that motivated our call for papers are both familiar
and pressing: Howshould the humanities come to terms with changes
in our experience of the world and in the new forms of knowledge and
conceptual exchanges now emerging? How do these changes aect
our objects of study, our methodologies, our habits of thought? And
how, conversely, can literary and cultural critics formulate a set of
questions to evaluate these new developments? In this issue of Ameri-
can Literature, we bring together scholars who try to imagine what
literary and cultural studies would look like if science and technology
were seated at the table. We see themas dynamic partners rather than
unwelcome guests or hereditary enemies, not always congenial but
necessarily in dialogue. In these new convergences, the keyword for
us is and, a copula meant not to eliminate the distance between litera-
ture and science or to suggest an easy harmony but, rather, to map out
a contact zone, a few interrogatory points, as it were, through which
one discipline might put pressure on the other, might generate fric-
tions that illuminate.
4
We want to bear down on the sciences, holding themaccountable for
issues not necessarily expressible through their disciplinary language
and not necessarily highlighted for their practitioners. At the same
Preface 707
time, and with no less urgency, we want to bear down on the humani-
ties, holding themaccountable in just the same way. Like the sciences,
the humanities have elds of inquiry naturalized by convention; these
institutional domains appear as if they were objective facts. That prob-
lem is as acute now as it was fty years ago. Most of us, profession-
alized into our respective elds, tend to do our work according to set
protocols, unstated but tacitly obeyed, and largely invisible to us. We
tend to cite the same theoretical texts, apply them to similar archives,
derive from them the same analytic lexicon, the same periodization,
the same set of questions to be addressed. Using the language of
Thomas Kuhn, we can say that the humanities, no less than the sci-
ences, are paradigm-dependent, paradigm-legitimated, and paradigm-
normalizing.
5
As institutional artifacts, both are dedicated to regulat-
ing their output and reproducing their practitioners in a recognizable
mold. It is against this shared normativityagainst the mechanisms of
regulation and reproduction at work in both disciplinesthat we hope
to mobilize one against the other, the better to disturb xed protocols
in each.
Four sets of questions are brought into relief by this interdisci-
plinary contact. First, on the most immediate level, how are the
humanities aected by new technologies such as the Internet and
electronic archives? How have these technologies changed the meth-
ods and the very materials of our research? The digitized library not
only allows broad access to multimedia databases but also unglues
the packets of information built into standard editions, generating
newkinds of evidence and making the infrastructure of research more
experimental, more open to scrutiny, and more hospitable to collabora-
tive work. How might the humanities, currently an atomic enterprise
rewarding the highly stylized work of individual stars, respond to
these pressures for access, for democratization of the profession, for
public accountability?
Even as digitized archives transform the nature of work in the hu-
manities, inscription technologies intervene from a dierent direc-
tion. Donna Haraway has written of the cyborg as a composite of
organism and machine.
6
The same analysis might be extended to the
novel, a print genre inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, nowturning into hypertext in the twenty-rst centurya multi-
level and multipathway network, its very form a function of readerly
decision. Can we still speak of authorial intention (or authorial con-
708 American Literature
sciousness) when the literary text is operationally dened by its physi-
cal properties: unconventional page design, dierent types of fonts,
the recycling and redeploying of material from other representational
media, as well as a repertoire of indexical activities demanded of the
reader? Do we still read at the same pace, with the same distribution
of attention, the same license and constraint? What kind of readerly
subjectivity is being generated?
Meanwhile, science and technology are not just forces of change.
They are themselves human vehicles, not given but made, and thus
belong to that world of motivated means and ends that is the prov-
ince of the humanities. The discourse of science is literature, which
was how the word was understood in the fourteenth and fteenth cen-
turies, a usage recently enlarged upon by Michel Serres and Bruno
Latour.
7
This broad denition suggests that science literacy is a birth-
right and perhaps also an obligation for those of us in literature depart-
ments. J. M. Coetzee, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Richard Lewontin have
all called attention to the metaphors of science and the way this meta-
phoricity qualies sciences claim to being an objective, numerical
discipline.
8
Perhaps there is no such thing as a natural science, since
the very articulation of a scientic concept takes it away from the
realmof nature into the realmof human speech, where it carries all the
cultural baggage of humanity. This is especially visible now in discus-
sions about and cultural representations of genes, an almost inescap-
able nodal point for discourses about identiable, ownable, and trans-
missible personhood.
Science, in this way, becomes evidence in the humanities archive.
But not without asking some hard questions about the scope and ratio-
nale of that archive, especially in light of its counterparts in the sci-
ences. The archives for astrophysics and evolutionary biology com-
prise large-scale phenomena, traceable only across extended duration:
14 billion light years in the case of the former, a few hundred mil-
lion years in the case of the latter. What sort of phenomena should
the humanities explore, and what is the scale on which the eviden-
tiary domains should be constructed? What dierence would it make
if the humanities were to adopt, say, the scale of ecological disasters
the scale of nuclear accidents or global warmingto map out the
space and time coordinates of their discipline? What analytic lexicon
would emerge? What sequences of events would show up in humani-
ties narratives?
Preface 709
The rst four essays in this issue focus primarily on the way ction
registers scientic thought, while making clear that this is hardly a
one-way street. All four demonstrate how conceptual changes in the
sciences are accompanied by cognitive shifts that they simultaneously
precede, accompany, and augment. Fiction both reects and fosters
those changes. All four essays, implicitly or explicitly, advocate an
activist role for ction in shaping responses to a changing environment
and shifting ideas about our places within it.
In tracing the connections between the late-nineteenth-century lit-
erary movement known as realism and historically contemporary
developments in neurology and brain biology, for example, Randall
Knoper illustrates their mutual impact. In so doing, he oers a nu-
anced understanding not only of realism but also of the history of sci-
ence in the United States. The preeminence of Freud has obscured
other models of cognition and consciousness that continue subtly
to shape cultural assumptions about subjectivity and experience. By
attending to the impact of late-nineteenth-century neuroscience on
some of the most inuential writers of the period, Knoper encourages
a new consideration of some of those obscured assumptions as well
as the active part literature played, not only in registering but also in
fostering conceptual change.
While Knoper chronicles the historical development of a literary
form of cognition, Ursula Heise calls attention to the current need for
new literary forms and genres that respond to analogous changes. In
her study of the relationship of narrative form to risk analysis and
ecological disaster, she argues that while literary treatments of that
topic register the emergence of new subjectivities, writers reliance
on familiar narrative forms protect readers from the instabilities and
uncertainties that the characters face. The result, she argues, is a
retreat from precisely the conceptual challenges that writers such as
Don DeLillo and Richard Powers ostensibly advocate. Contemporary
ction, she observes, must nd new formsperhaps new media
through which to capture the challenges of new subjects and new
subjectivities.
For N. Katherine Hayles, those forms have already begun to
emerge. In response to the literary challenge of how to reconcile
mainstream readers desire for coherent characters with the (vari-
710 American Literature
ously) fragmented subjects of philosophy, science, and literary criti-
cism, Hayles oers Mark Danielewskis House of Leaves as a work
predicated on the new storytelling media for which Heise calls. In
his endlessly refracted tales within tales, Danielewski makes use of
remediation, in which material presented in one media reappears in
another. This re-presentation, which calls attention to the specicities
of each of the media involved in the transposition, underscores (in this
case) the new roles for print in a digital age. If we consider disciplines
as having corresponding media for the presentation of data, remedia-
tion may provide a useful conceptual frame for understanding the rich,
though complicated, relationships among science, technology, ction,
and literary criticism.
Those relations are currently shifting, according to Jay Clayton, who
sees a subgenre (and accompanying synergy) emerging out of their
productive ux. In the particular imaginative writing about science
that he dubs geek novels, Clayton identies a convergence that, like
all such phenomena, is at once immensely creative and profoundly
rough-edged. Emergencies, notes Clayton, promote cross-disciplinary
communication, but habits of thought (such as disciplines) prove
recalcitrant. The trick, he contends, is to nd ways of turning eec-
tive responses to the present emergency . . . into permanent criti-
cal strategies, and the archetype for such strategies is the develop-
ment of the literature-about-science subgenre that he chronicles in
his essay.
Two observations from Claytons essay could serve as epigraphs
for Martha Nell Smiths pivotal account of the genesis and contribu-
tion of the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities, which
she directs. Prophecy courts the ridicule of time, writes Clayton,
and those who dream of tomorrow often wake to laughter. Smith
indeed recalls her colleagues bemused skepticism when news of her
intention to integrate new media technologies into her research and
scholarship became known. But Clayton also insists that a critical
engagement with technology, not withdrawal, is the best hope for what
were once called humanist values, and indeed Smith demonstrates
howthat engagement is setting newstandards and opening newpossi-
bilities for editorial and scholarly work in the humanities. At the same
time, she insists, this technology can promote productive and unprece-
dented collaboration in the humanities, not only among coauthors or
co-editors but also among readers, authors, and editors. Using pri-
Preface 711
marily the example of the Emily Dickinson archives, Smith shows how
new media technologies can upset ossied (and profoundly racialized
and gendered) assumptions about authorship and shift the orientation
of textual editing and literary criticism.
The remaining three essays reverse the direction of the rst group
as they use rhetorical analysis to showhowhumanities archives might
complicate and unsettle our understanding of science. Legal dis-
course, lm, and poetry are not just passive indexes of technological
development. They have something to say in return.
For Robyn Wiegman, the custody battle over a boy born as the
result of the accidental in vitro implantation of the fertilized eggs
of a black couple in a white woman illustrates the heady brew of
cultural assumptions mixed into new reproductive technologies. By
juxtaposing the media accounts of the custody battle and the con-
temporary popular lm Made in America, Wiegman foregrounds the
unresolved and contradictory meanings of race that emerge in these
discussions and that, in turn, make legible the messiness of aect,
personhood, property, and kinship. Wiegman notes the evident desta-
bilizing that emerges as these technologies challenge formerly mean-
ingful and unquestioned categories. Popular culture thus bears wit-
ness to a struggle between the familiar narratives of white liberalism
and masculinity that nd utopian expression as the desire for multi-
racial kinship and the messy details to which Wiegman calls our
attention. She asks that we consider the consequences both for the
(social) understanding of the case and for the practice of science when
genetics replaces gestation as the foundational language of property-
as-life, and maternal aect is rerouted in the language of the law from
the discourse of the body to the property life of the gene.
Similarly, Stephanie Turner is interested in how two popular nar-
ratives, Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World, show how the
eld of molecular biology created habits of thought about DNA largely
through metaphors that continue to govern not only popular but also
scientic understandings of the DNA molecule. Arguing that these
metaphors laid the foundation for our present bioinformatics econ-
omy, in which the marriage of biology and information technology in
postcapitalism has transformed the life sciences into a global network
of commodity biological information, Turner illustrates the develop-
ment and consequences of what she calls a surplus of meaning asso-
ciated with the master molecule. Placing cloning at the center of her
712 American Literature
inquiry, she shows how literary analyses of popular narratives poten-
tially challenge even as (or maybe because) they reproduce the often
obscurantist structuring assumptions of reprogenetics.
The volume concludes with an essay that turns to poetry to articu-
late a new conception of time, both humanist and scientic. For Wai
Chee Dimock, the modern world is ruled by Newtonian mechanics,
in turn governed by the jurisdiction of number, which is especially
powerful when it serializes the world in the form of dates. To the
extent that a national chronology rests on a xed sequence of dates,
it is very much a Newtonian artifact. Against this serialization of the
national within the numerical, Dimock argues for an alternative, non-
Newtonian time, traceable to Aristotle and Einstein, and recoverable
through the reading of poetry. Robert Lowells uses of Roman history
during the Vietnam warjuxaposing the year 65 with the year 1965
put this non-Newtonian time to work.
As these essays make clear, we experience the world through space
and time coordinates that are naturalized (almost) beyond inspection
by conventions of language and habits of thought. These space and
time coordinates determine what counts as data in both the humani-
ties and the sciences. But it has also been a stated goal in both disci-
plines to interrogate the evidentiary domains so constituted. The idea
of two cultures assumes a mutual defensiveness that makes this
interrogation dicult. Pointing, as in fact Snowdid, to the potential for
communication across disciplines, we try to experiment here with a
variety of languages that, we hope, will loosen up protocols currently
reproduced with too much normative force. Our goal is to encourage
both the sciences and the humanities to estrange themselves from
themselves, seeing with the shock of recognition that comes only
when we take up residence in a dierent archive, a dierent body of
knowledge mapping the idea and experience of humanity. The essays
that follow take on the task of making visible the contours of the obvi-
ouswhat we overlook when what we see is beyond question.
Yale University
Duke University
Notes
1 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959; reprint, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1993), 3, 4. For critical responses to Snow, see The Two Cul-
Preface 713
tures: The Signicance of C. P. Snow, ed. F. R. Leavis (NewYork: Pantheon,
1963); and more recently, One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature,
ed. George Levine (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987); and The
One Culture, ed. Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 2001).
2 Steven Shapin, The Scientic Revolution (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1996), 3.
3 We do not mean, however, to draw a stark line between our project and
science studies. An emerging eld, science studies is both broad and ex-
ible, and several of the contributors to this volume have been (and re-
main) central to its formation and development.
4 Even an instance of interdisciplinary hostility such as the Sokal Hoax
can be illuminating; see Alan D. Sokal, Transgressing the Boundaries:
Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of QuantumGravity, Social Text
4647 (springsummer 1996): 21752; Sokal, A Physicists Experiments
with Cultural Studies, Lingua Franca 6 (May 1996): 6264; AndrewRoss
and Bruce Robbins, Mystery Science Theatre, Lingua Franca 6 ( July
1996): 5457; and Ross and Robbins, The Sokol Hoax: A Forum, Lingua
Franca 6 ( July 1996): 5862. These essays, along with responses pub-
lished in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Times
Literary Supplement, have been collected in The Sokol Hoax: The Sham
That Shook the Academy, ed. the editors of Lingua Franca (Lincoln: Univ.
of Nebraska Press, 2000). For a vigorous objection to cultural studies
as confusing an antirealist epistemology with a radical politics, see John
Guillory, The Sokal Aair and the History of Criticism, Critical Inquiry
28 (winter 2002): 470508.
5 Thomas S. Kuhn argues that normal science is unied and legitimized
by a tacitly obeyed paradigm, until a scientic revolution comes along and
causes a paradigm shift (The Structure of Scientic Revolutions, 2d ed.
[Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970]). For an important response to
Kuhn, see Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy
of Science (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1980).
6 See Donna J. Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and
Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149
81.
7 As Raymond Williams points out, the word literature came into the
English language in the fourteenth century (from French, littrature, and
Latin, litteratura), and its fteenth-century adjectival form was the word
literate rather than the word literary, which did not enter the language
until the seventeenth century. For Williamss illuminating discussion, see
Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1976), 15054. For Michel Serress analysis of information theory
as a linguistic system, see The Origin of Language: Biology, Information
714 American Literature
Theory, and Thermodynamics, in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philoso-
phy, ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 1982), 7183. For Bruno Latours analysis of science as literature,
see Science in Action (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), 2162.
8 See J. M. Coetzee, Newton and the Ideal of a Transparent Scientic Lan-
guage, Journal of Literary Semantics 11 (April 1982): 313; reprinted in
Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 18194; Evelyn Fox Keller, Reguring Life:
Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (NewYork: Columbia Univ. Press,
1995); and Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Envi-
ronment (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000).